Spirit Read online

  Gerda, meanwhile, went searching for her brother, seeking help from birds and flowers. Peggy and Laura’s favourite was the story that was told to Gerda by the hyacinths, about three fair sisters, and they liked to imagine that they were the three fair sisters, and played endless games in which they dressed up in their mother’s evening gowns and incessantly combed their hair.

  Gerda sought the help of a little robber-maiden, and the wise advice of the Lapland woman and the Finland woman. She fought an army of vicious snowflakes, the Snow Queen’s guards; and eventually she found the Snow Queen’s palace, with walls that were formed of the driven snow, and its windows of the cutting wind. She sang a hymn to Kay, who wept, and when he wept, the splinter of mirror was washed out of his eye. Together, they returned home. The clock said ‘tick-tock!’ and the hands moved as before. The grandmother meanwhile sat in God’s good sunshine and read from the Bible these words, ‘Unless ye become as little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven’.

  Elizabeth was re-reading The Snow Queen because it reminded her so much of Peggy. It made her feel as if Peggy might still be alive, somewhere, in that parallel world of driven snow and chilling winds. But she was worried about the hyacinth story. It had been worrying her all week. In fact, it had worried her so much that she hadn’t dared to look at it, until today. She read it again, and as she read it she felt guiltier and guiltier and when she had finished she closed the book tight, and held it close to her chest, her cheeks flushed with unhappiness.

  ‘There were three fair sisters, transparent and delicate they were; the kirtle of one was red, that of the second blue, of the third pure white; hand in hand they danced in the moonlight beside the quiet lake; they were not fairies, but daughters of men. Sweet was the fragrance when the maidens vanished into the wood; the fragrance grew stronger; three biers, whereon lay the three sisters, glided out from the depths of the wood, and floated upon the lake; the glow-worms flew shining around like little hovering lamps. Sleep the dancing maidens, or are they dead?’

  What if Peggy had remembered that part of the story, when she was out in the garden, in the whirling snow? What if she had tried to dance on the surface of the swimming-pool, like the three fair sisters dancing by the lake?

  Worst of all, what if it were all her fault that Peggy had drowned?

  She glanced up at Laura; just to make sure that Laura didn’t suspect anything; but Laura was too busy practising her movie-star pout in the mirror.

  Elizabeth lay awake for hours that night and heard the clock in the hallway strike midnight. From father and mommy’s room she could hear murmuring conversation, quiet and sad. There had been no sobbing today, thank goodness, and no shouting, and no slamming of doors. Father and mommy were both too tired. Mrs Patrick said they looked like ghosts; although she wouldn’t tell them whether she’d ever seen any real ghosts to compare them to.

  The murmuring conversation died away. Elizabeth counted to 1001. Then, she eased herself out of bed.

  With Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy book hidden under her dressing-gown, Elizabeth tippy-toed along the landing, and down the stairs. She had to tread very carefully, because every stair creaked. She had read in a mystery story, however, that burglars always made sure that they trod on the very, very edges of the stairs, close to the wall, or close to the banisters, and if you did that, you scarcely ever made a sound. In fact, really good burglars could actually run upstairs, totally silently.

  In the living-room, the remains of the day’s fire were still glowing, ashy and orange. Elizabeth crossed the threadbare red rug and stood in front of the hearth for a moment, debating with herself if she ought to try burning the fairy book, but in the end she decided that it would probably take too long – and what would happen if father came downstairs and caught her before she had finished? Father had been furious when he heard that away in some country called Germany some people called Nazis were burning books. He said that burning books was as bad as burning babies.

  She went through to the kitchen. Although the floor was tiled, and the windows were already misted with cold, it was warm here, because father had stacked up the range for the night. Ampersand the cat was sleeping in his basket next to the range, but when Elizabeth came in he opened one slitty eye and watched her as she walked around the table to the back door.

  As quietly as she could, she levered back the bolts and turned the key. Then she stepped out into the silent, snowy night. She crossed the lawn to the shed. Her footsteps made a felty, squeaking noise in the snow. The moon was masked by cloud, but the garden was luminous enough for Elizabeth to be able to see where she was going. Her blue velveteen slippers were quickly soaked, and she was shivering. Yet her guilt was so overwhelming that she had to hide the book, as urgently as a murderer has to hide a gun.

  If her parents ever discovered that she had read Peggy The Snow Queen . . . Well, she couldn’t imagine what would happen, but whatever it was, it would be terrible. They might even end up with a broken home.

  She knelt down beside the shed, and scooped back the snow with her bare hand. During the autumn, she had discovered a crevice underneath the floor of the shed, and she had used it to hide some of her love letters. They hadn’t been real love letters, of course, she had written them all herself, but she would have been mortified if anybody had found them – especially the one from Clark Gable which ended ‘I promise you that I will wait with bated breath until you have reached 21.’

  She wedged the fairy book into the crevice, and pushed it as far under the shed as she could reach. Then she carefully scraped back the snow, and patted it so that it looked reasonably undisturbed.

  There was a prayer in The Snow Queen which she had long ago learned by heart, because the first time she had read it, it had seemed so sweet and pretty. Tonight, however, it seemed tragic, and she stood in the snow in her dressing-gown with tears streaming down her cheeks, barely able to pronounce the words because her throat was choked up so much.

  Our roses bloom and fade away,

  Our Infant Lord abides alway;

  May we be blessed His face to see,

  And ever little children be!

  She shivered in what she estimated was just about a minute’s silence, and then she hurried back across the garden. Ampersand wearily opened his one slitted eye again, and watched her tippy-toe through to the living-room. Humans, I don’t know-where they find the energy.

  She climbed the stairs, keeping close to the wall, burglar-style. It was only when she reached the landing that she realized that father was standing in the shadowy doorway of his bedroom, watching her. She said, ‘Ah!’ in terror, and almost wet herself.

  ‘Lizzie?’ he asked her. ‘What have you been doing?’ But his voice was gentle, and she knew at once that he wasn’t going to be cross with her.

  ‘I thought I heard something,’ she stuttered, her teeth clattering with cold.

  He came out of the shadows. He wasn’t wearing his spectacles, and his eyes were swollen and plum-coloured with tiredness.

  ‘What was it?’ he asked her. ‘What did you hear?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe an owl.’

  He laid his hand on her shoulder. ‘Well, it might have been. You know what they say about owls.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘They say that owls bring messages from dead people,’ he told her. ‘They can fly from the land of the living to the land of the dead, and back again, all in one night.’

  Elizabeth looked up at him, wondering if he were serious. ‘It wasn’t an owl. It was just nothing.’

  He hesitated for a while, keeping his hand on her shoulder. Then he said, ‘I’m going down to the library, do you want to come? I haven’t been sleeping too well. You can help yourself to a soda if you’d care to.’

  ‘Okay, sure,’ she said, as sweetly as she could, in case he changed his mind. She suddenly felt pleased that she was nine, and rather grown-up. She betted he wouldn’t have asked Laura to help herself to a s
oda, and join him in the library, right slapbang in the middle of the night, for goodness’ sake.

  The two of them went downstairs together, and this time the stairs creaked and it didn’t matter. Elizabeth went to the Frigidaire, crammed with platefuls of Mrs Patrick’s leftovers, and found a frosty-chilled bottle of Coca-Cola. She returned to the library to find that her father had drawn his big leather chair up close to the fireplace, and that he had poured himself a large cut-crystal glass of whiskey, and set it in the brown-tiled grate.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said; and so she dragged up his old piano-stool, the one with the frayed tapestry seat and all the music inside it, strange musty-yellow music that nobody would ever play, like ‘Climbing Up The Golden Stairs’ and ‘Break The News To Mother’.

  Elizabeth swigged Coca-Cola from the bottle and watched the fire embers dying away. She wondered if father were going to talk, or whether he would sit here in silence, drinking whiskey and staring at nothing at all.

  ‘I guess you miss Peggy pretty sorely,’ he said, at last.

  Elizabeth nodded.

  Her father said, ‘The Reverend Earwaker keeps telling me that the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, as if that’s supposed to make me feel better. I don’t know. I wouldn’t have minded what the Lord had taken away from me – my arms, my legs, my eyes . . . But not little Peggy, not my little Clothes-Peg. He didn’t have to take her away.’

  ‘I expect she’s happy,’ ventured Elizabeth.

  Her father glanced across at her and gave her half a smile. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I expect she is.’

  ‘Laura and I say prayers to her, every night, and talk to her, too.’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’m glad of that.’

  Elizabeth said, ‘You’re not sorry you had her, are you?’

  There was a lengthy silence. One of the last logs lurched in the hearth, sending a whirl of sparks up the chimney. ‘That’s a very mature question,’ said her father. ‘I’m not too sure that I know what the answer is.’

  ‘Sometimes I think that mommy’s a bit sorry she had any of us.’

  ‘Your mommy? Your mommy’s not sorry she had you, any of you! Nothing of the kind!’

  ‘But if she hadn’t had us, she could have been a movie actress, couldn’t she?’

  Her father had pressed his hand over his mouth for a while, as if he were making quite sure that no words came out until he was sure what he was going to say. Then he explained, ‘Your mommy is one of these people who always needs to think that their life could have been different.’

  ‘But it could have been, couldn’t it? She was on Broadway.’

  ‘Yes,’ her father agreed, ‘she was on Broadway.’

  ‘And she could have been a famous movie star?’

  She could tell by her father’s expression that he was tempted to say no. She was almost tempted to say it for him. He couldn’t look at her: wouldn’t look at her, in the way that he wouldn’t look at mommy whenever mommy started talking about El Morocco and Monty Woolley and Fifty Thousand Frenchmen. Elizabeth suddenly realized that she had known for quite a long time that mommy had never been gifted with whatever it takes to be a famous movie star, the style, the idiosyncrasy, the voice, the kind of face that cameras fell in love with.

  But mommy’s lost movie career was one of the articles of faith of Buchanan family life, and they both understood that it was heresy to question it.

  Father looked down into his drink and said, ‘Whatever you do, Lizzie, don’t regret things that you never did. Don’t ever pine for anything. Not men, not money, not things you think you should have had.’

  Elizabeth drank more Coca-Cola, and gave her father a sage nod of the head. She was beginning to enjoy herself. This was grown-up talk, in the middle of the night.

  Her father said, ‘Don’t pine for Peggy, either. She’s gone now, and no amount of pining can bring her back. Don’t worry: she won’t be alone. We’re going to put Mr Bunzum in the coffin, to keep her company.’

  Elizabeth stared at him in horror, and then burped, because of the Coca-Cola. ‘You can’t do that!’

  Her father frowned at her. ‘Why not, Lizzie? Mr Bunzum was Peggy’s favourite toy.’

  ‘But he’ll suffocate! And he never liked the dark! You know he never liked the dark!’

  ‘Lizzie, sweetheart, Mr Bunzum is a toy rabbit.’

  ‘But you can’t! Peggy wouldn’t want you to! Mr Bunzum’s real! Mr Bunzum isn’t even dead yet! He had real adventures, I can prove it!’

  Her father put down his whiskey glass. ‘You can prove it?’ he asked.

  ‘Wait.’ Elizabeth hurried upstairs, burglar-syle so that the stairs wouldn’t creak. She crept across her bedroom, so that she wouldn’t wake Laura, and then she opened her desk. She took out three well-worn exercise books, and then hurried back downstairs again. Her father was still sitting in the same place, although he had picked up his whiskey glass again. She handed him the books and said, ‘There.’

  Because he was tired, and because he wasn’t wearing his glasses, her father found it difficult to focus at first. But when he held the first exercise book at arm’s length, he was able to read out ‘Mr Bunzum Goes To Hollywood’.

  ‘You wrote this?’ he asked Elizabeth.

  ‘I wrote all of them.’

  Her father set down his glass, licked the tip of his finger, and opened the first page. He stared at it for a very long time, and swallowed. The dying light from the fireplace reflected from the tears that were welling up in his eyes.

  ‘Chapter One,’ he read out. ‘Mr Bunzum Sees A Movie.’

  He paused for a while, and then he read, ‘Mr Bunzum was a person who lived in a big white house in Sherman, Connecticut, with his friend Peggy and Peggy’s two sisters Elizabeth and Laura. Mr Bunzum’s problem was that he was a rabbit, which made life very difficult for him, i.e. he was the proud owner of an excellent red Packard but could not drive it because every time he drove it the cops stopped him and said “you’re breaking the law, whisker-face.” Also he could not eat in restaurants because whenever he walked in for lunch and said “lunch?” they thought that he was the lunch.

  ‘But Peggy loved Mr Bunzum so much that she dressed him and fed him and took him everyplace he wanted to go, for which Mr Bunzum was internally grateful. Mr Bunzum for his part loved Peggy too and the two of them were the firmest friends that anyone had ever known.

  ‘Mr Bunzum – ’ But here, Elizabeth’s father was stopped right in the middle of reading by a terrible sob. He bent forward in his chair as if he had the world’s worst stomach ache, and he was grimacing with grief. He sat there shaking and sobbing, and he wouldn’t stop. In the end there was nothing that Elizabeth could do but tippy-toe upstairs again. She climbed back into the chilly sheets of her bed and lay in the darkness with her heart beating, and prayed to Jesus that she had done the right thing.

  She saw the moon come out. She thought of The Snow Queen, and the maidens dancing by the lake. She could smell the flowers on their biers; and they were Peggy’s funeral-flowers. She heard Laura’s blocked-nose breathing; and the clock downstairs striking two. Then suddenly she was dreaming, and she couldn’t think how.

  In the morning, she found her exercise books back on her desk, with Mr Bunzum lolling on top of them. There was a note beside them, on her father’s Candlewood Press notepaper. The note read, ‘I have read all of Mr Bunzum’s adventures and agree with you that he is a real person, still alive, and not to be buried. You are a writer of wonderful talent and imagination, and one day much grander publishers than me will be proud to publish your books. – All my love and XXXX, your father.’

  Three

  When father opened their curtains on the morning of the funeral, they could see that the snow was falling thick and hurried. He was already dressed in his black trousers and his black jacket and his starched white shirt. He looked very tired and old, as if he had aged a hundred years in a week. His face looked papery, Elizabeth thought. He had trimmed hi
s beard and he smelled of that spicy cologne that mommy had given him for Christmas; but he looked like a fastidious old man, rather than father.

  ‘Breakfast’s ready,’ he told them. ‘Make it quick as you can. The guests will start arriving at a quarter past ten, or thereabouts.’

  After he had gone, Laura bounced out of bed in her long pink nightgown and went to the window. ‘It’s really deep!’ she exclaimed. ‘We could build a snow-angel!’

  ‘What do you mean, a snow-angel?’ asked Elizabeth.

  Laura pressed her hands together as if she were praying, and closed her eyes. ‘You know, a snow-angel. Like the angels in the graveyard, only snow.’

  Elizabeth climbed out of bed and stood beside her. The snow was whirling down so furiously they could scarcely see the garden. ‘Yes, we could,’ she said. ‘And we could make it look just like Peggy.’

  Laura looked up at her, her eyes still sticky with sleep, her blonde curls tousled. ‘Do you think that Peggy will be an angel?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Elizabeth, although she didn’t feel completely certain about it. ‘She never did anything mean or nasty, did she? And she was only five. You know what Jesus said about suffer the little children to come unto Me.’

  ‘Why did they have to suffer?’ asked Laura. ‘I thought Jesus was supposed to be kind.’

  ‘Everybody has to suffer sometimes,’ Elizabeth told her. ‘That’s what Mrs Dunning said at Sunday school.’

  ‘Succotash has to suffer, too,’ said Laura.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what they say in the funnies. “Suffering succotash!” ’

  They put on their slippers and their cuddly woollen robes, Elizabeth blue and Laura pink, and went downstairs to the kitchen. It was so gloomy that Mrs Patrick had switched on the lights. It wasn’t a quiet breakfast. Fifty people were expected for lunch; and Mrs Patrick was punching seven kinds of hell out of a huge batch of bread-roll dough; while a brown cauldron of chicken chowder was quietly blabbering to itself on top of the range, next to a boiling stuffed ham sewn up in muslin, which rhythmically rose and fell in its seething pot like somebody’s boiling head.